A Poisson Regression Examination of the Relationship between Website Traffic and Search Engine Queries

A new area of research involves the use of Google data, which has been normalized and scaled to predict economic activity. In this paper, Poisson regressions are used to explore the relationship between the online traffic to a specific website and the search volumes for certain keyword search queries, along with the rankings of that specific website for those queries. Daily and weekly data are used to discuss the effects that normalization, scaling, and aggregation have on the empirical findings, which are frequency-dependent.